By VP of Business Development and Founder Colin BarcelouxColin has a BS in Management Information Systems and a Minor in Information Technology from Santa Clara University where he graduated with Honors in 2003. Colin resides in San Francisco and is an avid snowboarder, basketball enthusiast, mountain biker, and golfer.

Today, we announced that BookRenter has saved students over $101 million dollars off the cost of textbooks. This is not only a special day for BookRenter, but also for me personally. When I started BookRenter I hoped that we’d reach a point where we would help so many students afford school, but now I can see this is really just the beginning. I got the idea to start BookRenter when I was a college student at Santa Clara University. Like students today, I was extremely frustrated with the high cost of textbooks. While at school, I worked three part-time jobs to help cover my out of pocket expenses, and textbooks were always the largest. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the status quo – buying textbooks and selling them back – is just a really expensive rental. When I started BookRenter, textbook rental was a new thing and today thanks in large part to BookRenter, rentals are fast becoming the preferred method for getting course materials.

From the very beginning, our mission at BookRenter has been to make education more affordable. After tuition, textbooks are the largest educational expense. Course materials cost on average $1,137 per year (College Board); that is a staggering number. For the millions of people attending community college, that averages about 40% of the annual cost of education. By renting textbooks, students can save up to 80%– that’s about $500 per year depending on what you study. When you start to apply that savings across the student population of the US, the result is tremendous. And for students scraping by on loans and grants to get through school, the impact of textbook rental takes on a whole new meaning. We created this picture to help people see how huge textbook rental can be. It makes us realize that $101 million is really just the beginning; $172 billion, here we come.